This is prompt number 173: Lullaby from the prompt table A level Omega at the live journal comm challengethe . Check it out.
Genesis
Hera won't stop crying, and Sharon just can't understand it.
She thought that children stopped doing this after they weren't babies anymore. Hera is only two, but she wouldn't call her a baby. A tiny child, sure, but not a baby. Weren't they supposed to only cry for no reason when they were babies?
Apparently Hera is different. Or maybe Athena really doesn't have any clue about children. Do cylons even have child-bearing instincts?
She thinks that might be it. She'd never even seen a kid until Boxey, and he wasn't that small. He could talk, at least. Hera can't, at least not beyond "dada" and "mama" and she doesn't seem to be comforted by anything Athena does. She's rubbed her back, changed her diaper, offered her food, bounced her, walked around the room, murmured under her breath, offered toys, told stories and every permutation of the above she can think of, and nothing works. So she sits on her and Helo's bed, holding her daughter and crying a little herself, because she's never failed so completely before in her life.
The hatch opens and a tired-looking Helo steps into the room. His face wrinkles a little at the noise, and he looks at her questioningly.
"What's wrong with Hera?"
Maybe it's the curiosity in his voice, like he expects her to just know because she's a mother and that's what they're supposed to do, or maybe it's his expression, which asks her to make it stop. Whatever it is that causes it, Athena explodes. "I don't frakking know, alright? I know I'm a bad mother, you don't have to rub it in my face." She's going to go on, but Karl looks wounded and she collapses like there's nothing holding her up anymore.
"How long has she been like this?" he asks, much more cautiously this time.
"Two hours, maybe more. I can't remember," she answers, weariness and self-hatred deep in her voice.
"Give her here," Karl orders gently. Part of her wants to yell at him again, refuse to part with Hera because she's her daughter, damnit, and she'll figure it out herself. But most of her just wants her child to stop crying.
Helo lifts the sniffling little girl carefully. Hera is dwarfed by him, and Athena wonders again how something so huge as Helo ever made something as tiny as Hera. The little girl grabs onto his dress blues and rubs her snotty nose on them, but doesn't stop crying. And Helo does something Athena has never seen him do before, ever since she first met him as Boomer the nugget.
He sings.
She can't quite make out the words, but it's low and soothing and somehow old. Hera feels it, she knows, because the sound simply stops. He rocks her and pats her back, but Athena knows he doesn't do that any better than her. It's the singing. It's more than a song, though. It has something behind it, a history that a less than five-year-old machine can't claim. She's a little jealous, that history and the past don't seem incredible to him. He was as tiny as Hera once, strange as it is to believe, and he has a history. Not just his own, but his mother's, his father's, his grandparents', his people's. Going back to Kobol, and all the way back to creation.
Athena would give anything to say the same.
When Hera is asleep in her crib and Athena can finally speak, she asks him, "What was that?"
He looks at her like she's nuts. "It's a lullaby, Sharon."
Somehow, the cylons left that out. She can't even find it in Boomer's manufactured memories. "What's a lullaby?"
His disbelief is coupled with scepticism. "You really don't know any lullabies?"
She shakes her head, suddenly shy. Sometimes it's easy to forget she's not human, and Helo must think so, too, because he hesitates. But that disappears as quickly as it came and he lies down on the bed, pulling her with him. He wraps his arms around her belly, rests his chin on her shoulder, and sings soft words into her ear.
She falls asleep quicker than she'd like, and dreams of herself as a little girl as small as Hera, smiling up at a mother and father who loved her, and when she wakes up she's crying.
Machines don't write songs, or lullabies, but maybe she can learn. Hera will have a history.